lossless-cut VS openshot-qt

For lossless cut, there's the LosslessCut [1] app, which even has an experimental but mostly working version of a "smart cut" feature [2] (aka. only re-encode the minimal mandatory amount of frames if you trim at a point between 2 key frames)

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

[2]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126

> thought I cropped/edited a video, it is still there in full length and resolution

It's been possible to create a clip from a video file that merely changes what parts of the video are displayed without effecting the data in the original since the Classic Mac OS days.

If you want to completely remove unwanted portions of a video to reduce the size without a loss of quality, there are many options. LosslessCut is one option that is both free and open source.

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

LosslessCut

Lossless Cut is probably the simplest way to cut out parts of a video without having to re-encode it or use an online service. It is open source, free and available for all platforms. It is in essence a frontend for FFMPEG and cuts without re-encoding, so the results are instantaneous.

Additionally I would like if possible to shorten (both to reduce dimension and to make them less boring) my videos by trimming the beginning and/or ends where often there is nothing interesting happening and possibly change the thumbnails for easier identification. Do you know of any tool that does the job with the minimum quality degradation possible? Many years ago I've tried with some videos and a tool I don't remember anymore, ending up with a bunch of corrupted files :( I've found https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut for the point above.. need to try it. please let me know what experience you have with it.

Lossless Cut would probably be a better choice for this. Will let you cut out the commercials without having to re-encode the video.

>Of course, you could only re-encode only the GoPs that get broken while keeping the rest intact, and I guess this would be better and a lot faster than re-encoding everything. I don't know if any application tries to do this.

LosslessCut does have experimental support for this partial re-encode called "smart cut" [1]. Since it's using ffmpeg internally, the challenge become how to instruct ffmpeg to do this[2]?

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126

OpenShot is great, FOSS and works well on my 2014 MBP: https://www.openshot.org/

I used DaVinci Resolve but it was very sluggish on older hardware.

Any good open source video editor for Windows? Top google results include https://www.openshot.org/ and https://shotcut.org/, but both don't have obvious links to the code repositories and it took me a while to find them which is often not a good sign.

Yes but it's outdated and missing a lot a features. I would recommend you OpenShot free open source video editor https://www.openshot.org/

Use openshot https://www.openshot.org/

OpenShot-v3.1.1-daily-11583-95eccafc-08c2cdd1-x86_64.exe (64-bit)Aug. 20, 2023, 4:56 p.m.OpenShot-v3.1.1-daily-11583-95eccafc-08c2cdd1-x86.exe (32-bit)Aug. 20, 2023, 5 p.m. OpenShot-v2.6.1-dev-daily-10692-89e4b1da-fab6e6ab-x86_64.exe 185 MBDec 10, 2022

I haven’t actually tried this but OpenShot keeps coming to mind for free, open-source video editing software.

Get Audacity (https://www.audacityteam.org/) and Open Shot (https://www.openshot.org/), or equivalents (see what you need to be able to do below) for your laptop/computer.

OpenShot - Price: Free Free and open-source video editor that allows you to edit and create videos with ease.